


now every door is closed

by nex_et_nox



Category: Norse Mythology, Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Ragnarok, Unreliable Narrator, copious amounts of norse mythology, it's good to have your daughter be the ruler of the dead, sort of character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-02
Updated: 2013-05-02
Packaged: 2017-12-10 05:43:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/782467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nex_et_nox/pseuds/nex_et_nox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When all is over and done, Gabriel lies cold, lies still, on the floor of the Elysian Hotel, great ashy wings spread out behind and beneath him, a testament to the archangel’s final stand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	now every door is closed

“Brœðr muno beriaz  
ok at bǫnom verða[z]  
muno systrungar  
sifiom spilla.  
Hart er í heimi,  
hórdómr mikill  
—skeggǫld, skálmǫld  
—skildir ro klofnir—  
vindǫld, vargǫld—  
áðr verǫld steypiz.  
Mun engi maðr  
ǫðrom þyrma.”

(“Brothers will fight  
and kill each other,  
sisters' children  
will defile kinship.  
It is harsh in the world,  
whoredom rife  
—an axe age, a sword age  
—shields are riven—  
a wind age, a wolf age—  
before the world goes headlong.  
No man will have  
mercy on another.”)

When all is over and done, Gabriel lies cold, lies still, on the floor of the Elysian Hotel, great ashy wings spread out behind and beneath him, a testament to the archangel’s final stand. When all is done, Loki the Trickster lies defeated on the ground, and elsewhere, ripples spread through power and fate and to the great reaches of the universe.

(Lucifer didn’t notice. He didn’t regret his actions, and he didn’t know.)

 

Ragnarök came for several possible reasons. For the death of Baldr, and a giantess who would not weep for him; certainly logical. Conceivably, because Loki’s children were taken from him, and because only his wife Sigyn stood next to him in the end.

(Perhaps because Loki-who-was-Gabriel remembered another fair face and another doting son and something sharp, ugly, painful reared up; perchance he did kill Baldr, perchance he did not, but it doesn’t matter now.)

 

It was said that Baldr’s death would herald Ragnarök, but there was supposed to be mistletoe and Höðr and venom from Skaði’s serpent.

Fenrir had claimed Odin’s life long ago, when Loki told him what he Saw, and what the Norns had told the All-Father. Jörmungandr recklessly called for Thor’s blood, even when his father told him of the fate that laid in store for the both of them. Hel simply watched on, her eyes narrowed slightly in her perfect, half-rotting face.

Loki had laughed lightly, and thought of how he was to kill and be killed by Heimdall in his own turn, and talked to his children, painted pictures with words of the way that their world was supposed to end. There were some tales the Messenger would still deliver.

Ragnarök was not supposed to come about this way, not at this place and time, rules and foretold future shattered by the appearance of one angry Judeo-Christian archangel. But what could be done to change what-has-been-done, to shift the altered-path-that-is back into what-should-be?

 

When all is over and done, Loki may have been Gabriel long ago, and he may have been Gabriel for a short while now, but for that long intervening period, he was _not_ Gabriel. He was Loki Laufeyjarson, Loki Silvertongue, Liesmith, Skywalker. Mother, father, Trickster, brother.

And so when Hel stepped softly into the room and laid two cold hands over her father’s heart, it was Loki who drew in another deep breath, who opened his eyes and sat up and grabbed his beautiful, wonderful, precious daughter’s hands.

“Very well done, my girl,” he murmured softly, lovingly.

Hel smiled down at him.

“Come,” Hel said to the chaos god. “We have work to do. There are other gods to awake – I do not think Fenrir would be pleased should we deny him the pleasure of devouring Odin himself, when the time comes.”

“Of course,” Loki said slowly. He carefully got to his feet, swaying slightly and pressing one hand against the wound to his chest that still sluggishly oozed out blood. A simple incantation, and the worst of it was healed, though it tickled some. “Let us wake them.”

 

The great wings lay etched on the ground where Gabriel had fallen. Loki got up and walked away. Lucifer never knew; Baldr’s death heralded Ragnarök with mistletoe and Höðr and a giantess who wouldn’t weep; brothers fell against each other all across the battlefield, and there were deaths where two gods died at once.

And the world started over.

(And Sam Winchester jumped into the Pit because the last vestige of Gabriel told him that it was the only thing he could do; and Dean never came back to find Gabriel’s body; and Castiel never knew that another brother had died only in a sense of the word, because a facet of him lived on, inhabiting the archangel’s vessel, causing chaos, and bringing the worlds’ ends.)


End file.
